Dutch reissue label Disky here takes advantage of European copyright law, which releases recordings more than 50 years old into the public domain, to assemble a lengthy collection of Broadway show music, the bulk of it drawn from original cast albums released in the 1940s and at the start of the 1950s. On the first two discs, four-to-six selections each have been drawn from the original Broadway cast albums of Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, and The King and I, as well ...
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Dutch reissue label Disky here takes advantage of European copyright law, which releases recordings more than 50 years old into the public domain, to assemble a lengthy collection of Broadway show music, the bulk of it drawn from original cast albums released in the 1940s and at the start of the 1950s. On the first two discs, four-to-six selections each have been drawn from the original Broadway cast albums of Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, and The King and I, as well as revival cast recordings of Porgy and Bess and Show Boat, all based on shows that opened in New York between 1943 and 1951. That means performers like Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, and Yul Brynner singing songs written by Rodgers & Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, among others. The tracks are all mixed up, and the sometimes-misspelled song and performer credits on the back of the CD box do not reveal which show each song comes from. The third disc, like its predecessors, begins with tracks from the '40s, but most of it is drawn from musicals of the 1930s and even the '20s. As formal cast albums did not exist in those days, the tracks are often studio recordings made by people who performed in the shows in New York and London. Among these rare curiosities is Jeanne Aubert's 1935 London recording of "You're the Top" from Porter's Anything Goes, containing the soon-to-be politically inappropriate compliment, "You're Mussolini!" Thus, there are plenty of classic show tunes and some hidden gems on this lengthy, inexpensive collection, as long as the consumer doesn't mind the bargain-basement packaging, variable sound quality, and scant annotations typical of such thrown-together, legally dubious efforts. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
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